Michael Atkinson
By Michael Atkinson
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Culture Sand Storms, Soldiers and Satire Set Stage for Other Israel Film Festival
With over 80 Jewish film festivals nationwide, we can certainly fathom how New York’s Other Israel Film Festival, with its mandate to focus on the “others” within Israeli life, has thrived, and reached its tenth year. One could in fact claim that this perspective is crucial to understanding Israeli life — many societies are predicated…
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Culture 100 Years Later, a Cinematic Time Capsule Is Opened
Movies — so thought a strain of film scholars famously led by Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer — are best seen as captured reality. Momentary history seized in amber. Aesthetics aside, it’s hard to argue, given how much human history in the past 125 years would’ve been lost to our eyes had it not been…
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Culture Looking Back at ‘The Bridge’ and Germany’s Lost Generation
If movies have taught us anything, it’s that the legacy of World War II is many times bigger and more varied than we thought – no matter what we had thought. Each year, documentaries are unleashed that limn another heretofore dark corner of the Holocaust, or the Jewish refugee experience, or an ambiguous Nazi pathology,…
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Culture Revisiting the Early Days of the Nazi Comedy
Exactly how popular culture has grappled with Nazism over the past 60-odd years forms a peculiar sort of curve. In films, the trajectory began with stock-villain propaganda and then evolved (in the 1950s and ’60s) toward a defensive, Jewish-comic sardonicism, which found itself capable of using the German fascism as farce. This abated in the…
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